The edition title says it all. Comic Strip Master Command sent me enough strips the past week for two editions and I made an unhappy discovery about one of the comics in today’s.
Dave Coverly’s Speed Bump for the 28th is your anthropomorphic-numerals joke for the week. We get to know the lowest common denominator from fractions. It’s easier to compute anything with a fraction in it if you can put everything under a common denominator. But it’s also — usually — easier to work with smaller denominators than larger ones. It’s always okay to multiply a number by 1. It may not help, but it can always be done. This has the result of multiplying both the numerator and denominator by the same number. So suppose you have something that’s written in terms of sixths, and something else written in terms of eighths. You can multiply the first thing by four-fourths, and the second thing by three-thirds. Then both fractions are in terms of 24ths and your calculation is, probably, easier.
So this strip is the rare one where I have to say the joke doesn’t work on mathematical grounds. Coverly was mislead by the association between “lowest” and “smallest”. 2 is going to be the lowest common denominator very rarely. Everything in the problem needs to be in terms of even denominators to start with, and even that won’t guarantee it. I hate to do that, since the point of a comic strip is humor and getting any mathematics right is a bonus. But in this case, knowing the terminology shatters the joke. Coverly would have a mathematically valid joke were 9 offering the consolation “you’re not always the greatest common divisor”, the largest number that goes into a set of numbers. But nobody thinks being called the “greatest” anything ever needs consolation, so the joke would fail all but mathematics class.
Randy Glasbergen’s Glasbergen Cartoons for the 29th is a joke of the why-learn-mathematics model. “Because we always have done this” is not a reason compelling by the rules of deductive logic. It can have great practical value. Experience can encode things which are hard to state explicitly, or to untangle from one another. And an experienced system will have workarounds for the most obvious problems, ones that a new system will not have. And any attempt at educational reform, however well-planned or meant, must answer parents’ reasonable question of why their child should be your test case.
I do sometimes see algebra attacked as being too little-useful for the class time given. I could see good cases made for spending the time on other fields of mathematics. (Probability and statistics always stands out as potentially useful; the subjects were born from things people urgently needed to know.) I’m not competent to judge those arguments and so shall not.
Carl Skanberg’s That New Carl Smell for the 29th is a riff on jokes about giving more than 100%. Interpreting this giving-more-than-everything as running a deficit is a reasonable one. I’ve given my usual talk about “100% of what?” enough times now; I don’t need to repeat it until I think of something fresh to say.
Jeffrey Caulfield and Alexandre Rouillard’s Mustard and Boloney for the 30th uses mathematics — story problems, specifically — as icons of intelligence. I can’t speak to the Mensa experience, but intellectual types trying to out-do each other? Yes, that’s a thing that happens. I mostly dodge attempts to put me to a fun mathematics puzzle. I’m embarrassed by how long it can take me to actually do one of these, when put on the spot. (I have a similar reaction to people testing my knowledge of trivia in the stuff I actually do know a ridiculous amount about.) Mostly I hope Dave Coverly doesn’t think I’m being this kid.
All of the Reading the Comics posts should be at this link. Essays that include Speed Bump are at this link. I don’t usually have a problem with it. Essays discussing Glasbergen Cartoons should be at this link. They won’t include Glasbergen’s longrunning The Better Half comic, which as far as I can find only ever appeared here the one time anyway. It’s a new tag anyway. Essays with a mention of That New Carl Smell are at this link. It’s a new tag, though, so give it some time if you want to read anything else. Essays with a mention of Mustard and Boloney are at this link. And my Fall 2018 Mathematics A-To-Z should continue for the rest of this calendar year. And it is open for requests for more of the alphabet. Thanks for reading.
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Found some squirrel/raccoon humor for you– “Freckles and his Friends” July 19, 1971– Two squirrels in a tree are complaining among themselves about human campers coming into the woods and inevitably leaving their garbage behind.The raccoon underneath them says “Hey watch where you’re throwing those nut shells!” as one shell hits him square on the muzzle. Sorry about the lack of math content.
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